Bing Enhances Microsoft Office’s Search Function

The new search works with the 2007, 2010, 2013, and online versions of Office. The search engine, which credits its speedy responses to having data centers around the world, constantly indexes the Web, promising to deliver more recent and relevant results than were available previously.

Illustrating this point in a blog post, Bing compared searching the word “grayscale” before and after the company took over Office search. Pre-Bing, the first four hits included three articles – why you should care about file formats, changing your calendar’s appearance, and Power View design tips – and a training video about creating organization charts in PowerPoint. Now, the results are much more specific, with the first hits relating to printing presentations and slides in black-and-white or grayscale, as well as how to reduce a color picture to shades of a single color.

Its involvement with Office isn’t Bing’s only new addition. Chrome users can install the Bing New Tab Page extension, which allows them to see the search engine’s homepage image in every new tab, as well as the Popular Now news feed, which displays news and trending searches along the bottom of the homepage.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.